Spaniards like my neighbor are feeling overexposed to foreign scrutiny these days. One 30 year-old, just out of a job, was alluding to the media din when she told me: “It’s battering to wake up everyday to the apocalypse.” Another explained: “There isn’t work, fine, but the world constantly talking about it is almost as bad.”

Across the political spectrum the Spanish press has been crying foul, with columnists and pundits griping that foreign snapshots misconstrue reality on the ground. King Juan Carlos I, concerned over Spain’s bruised image abroad, even visited theTimeson a recent trip to New York to “explain the current Spanish situation,” according to severalsources.

What is the foreign press doing, or saying, that has Spaniards so ill at ease?

When Spaniards complain about the gaze of the foreign media, they may also be lamenting something homegrown. While the anguished political establishment in Spain is stealing worried glances abroad, it is paying little heed to its domestic public. Spaniards’ fixation on the foreign press represents a transference of anxiety over their government’s disregard for them.

Not only are Spanish officials desperate to carry out the E.U.’s bidding. They are also obsessed with external indicators of market confidence in the country’s solvency and solidity. “Bond premiums are a case and point,” says the commentator Fernando Berlín, the editor of Radiocable.com, an online outlet that analyzes the foreign coverage of Spain. What onlookers abroad think is becoming news in its own right, with much ink spilled recapitulating foreign reports and appraisals.

One consequence is that the Spanish government now principally addresses itself to the foreign media outlets it sees as influential. The Spanish papers no longer are the privileged interlocutors they once were, at least not on economic policy. And Spaniards no longer are the chief intended audience of this government’s statements about budget cuts or deficit reduction.

Spaniards are justifiably feeling cut out of their own story. Even as the current economic crisis has put Spain center stage in the Continent-wide drama, Spaniards are being denied their role as essential protagonists in their democracy. Recent protests have picked up steam. Yet the government stays the course toward deeper austerity.

Jonathan Blitzer

A day after massive protests roiled the Spanish capital, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy gave a speech from New York, where, among other things, he had met with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Downplaying discontent at home, he referred to “a majority of Spaniards who are not protesting, who do not appear on the front pages of newspapers and who are not the lead stories on the television news programs. They are not seen, but they are there; they are a majority of the 47 million people who live in Spain.”